


a road that leads only up

by orphan_account



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, Established Relationship, Existential Fear, F/M, Insecurity, M/M, Parent/Child Incest, rick doesn't have a clue but he is Trying, with a tiny dose of emotionally maladjusted carl for good measure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 18:06:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5753122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s more mercy than he’s ever deserved, Rick thinks, folding his fingers around Carl’s. The fact that they’ve made it this far. Neither of them whole, neither of them the same as they were, but it’s more than he could have hoped for when he crawled into that tank two years ago, expecting to die.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a road that leads only up

**Author's Note:**

> set during the gap between season 3 and season 4. Rick is trying to balance his leadership role at the prison with being a father to Carl, and trying to balance the selflessness required of a father with the selfish fears inherent to being a lover. it's messy and hard on both of them.

“Hey, farmer’s boy.”

Carl can’t keep the smile off his face when he turns around, even though he tries. Doesn’t want Rick getting any ideas that he can get away with teasing him, but he can’t help it, he’s _glad_ to see his dad.

Even if the joke isn’t really funny, even if there’s still a lingering resentment prickling under his skin about having his gun taken away and being conscripted into making mulch and helping wean piglets. He didn’t realize how much he’d missed his father’s steady presence at his back until he heard the familiar drawling gravel of his voice. Rick’s been gone almost a day and a half on a supply run and the prison feels alien without him. He’s what makes it home, and not just for Carl – for all of them.

“Hey, dad,” Carl replies. He swallows his smile and plays it cool, spearing the hoe he’d been using into the freshly tilled ground and squinting up at his dad from under the brim of Rick’s old sheriff’s hat.

Rick is wearing a thin ghost of the same smile. He crosses the patchy grass between them with lanky strides, and before Carl has a chance to object, he finds himself being swept up in his father’s arms for a crushing hug. They stand like that a few moments before Carl starts to feel self conscious and squirms free.

Rick lets him go, but his eyes stay on Carl for a long moment afterward, soft and sad. That’s how Rick looks these days. Like he knows better than to try to hold on, but can’t stop himself from wanting.

Carl can’t put a name to the expression. It reminds him of how Lori used to look at Rick every time he left the prison without saying goodbye, those last months while they weren’t really talking. The grey, solemn way it sits in Rick’s face makes Carl feel like an asshole for not just letting Rick hug him for as long as he needed to. Any lingering trace of excitement at seeing his dad evaporates into a miserable sort of guilt.

“How’d the run go?” he asks, kicking at a loose tuft of grass by his foot.

Rick's smile dies too, and he shrugs.

“Alright. We got what we needed.”

“Cool.”

He should ask if Rick’s okay, probably. Should reach up under his jacket and feel him over for bites or scratches. That’s what his mom would have done. She used to do it every time Rick would come home late and looking worn down to the quick: stop him in the doorway and run her hands over his shoulders and arms and face. Then she’d give this slow, shaky sigh and wrap her arms around him and lay her head against his chest.

Carl thinks that would drive him crazy, to live every day with somebody else’s fear like that.

Maybe Rick misses it, that worry, now that Lori’s gone. All he’s got left of their family is Judith, who’s okay but still just a baby, not really a person yet, and Carl, who’s never quite what Rick wants or needs him to be. Maybe what Rick wants is someone who can let him wrap his arms around them and hold them for more than a few restless seconds. That’s not Carl’s problem. He’s not his mother, and he’s too frustrated with his dad to let him know how scared for him he is. Sometimes he’s too frustrated to even remember to feel scared for him at all.

Does that make him a bad person? Carl doesn’t know. He isn’t sure if stuff like that means anything anymore. He is what he is, and Rick is going to have to live with that: the imperfect result of his imperfect efforts.

“Hey. Believe me, you’d rather be in here with the plants.” Rick’s voice breaks Carl out of his thoughts.

“Yeah, right,” he replies, feeling surly and ungrateful.

“We need food we don’t have to risk our lives for every time. People need you here, doing this, Carl. _I_ need you here.”

“I get it, okay?” Carl snaps.

“Don’t,” Rick warns, and he sounds tired suddenly. He sounds _so tired_. How did Carl not hear it before? “Carl...just don’t. It’s not glamorous, but this is what I need from you. Everybody’s got a job to do. You know that.”

It’s unexpected when he reaches out and wraps his hand around the nape of Carl’s neck in a familiar, well-worn caress. Carl hates it, the way Rick always seems to have affection to give even when Carl doesn’t deserve it, which is often.

He scoffs softly, rolling the sour taste of his father’s distrust around in his mouth. “So my job’s making sure the spinach doesn’t get too much shade and moving a bunch of piles of dirt around, because I can’t be trusted with a gun, right?”

“That’s not it. I need – you won’t understand it for a long time, but I _need_ to know you’re right here, nowhere else.”

“It’s _stupid_. We shouldn't be doing this crap. You’re not a farmer, dad, and neither am I.”

“Carl – ”

“We should be out there, both of us! Every time there’s a run. We’re not – ” Carl jerks his head at the neat row of sprouting seedlings behind him, “This.”

“You’re right.” Rick leans down until they’re eye to eye, his weary, stubbled face close to Carl’s. “We’re not. But we are gonna try.”

Rick's mouth pulls tight into a frown, and his touch lingers, gripping the back of Carl’s neck softly before sliding down to squeeze his shoulder. Then his thumb slips under the collar of Carl’s shirt, tentative and intimate. It makes Carl shiver in the warm Georgia sun.

From a distance, it could maybe pass for a fatherly thing, but anyone who saw the look on Rick’s face would instantly know better. There’s yearning in the crease of his brow, sharp and plain. Carl feels his spine prickle self-consciously. They don’t do this out in the yard, or anyplace somebody might see. But Rick’s doing it now, smoothing the pad of his thumb back and forth over Carl’s collarbone with that gutted expression in his eyes.

Carl peers up at him, searching his face.

“Dad, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Rick says firmly. “I’m just tired.”

“You sure?”

Even though he knows he shouldn’t, Carl covers Rick’s hand with his own for a second and tilts his chin down until his lips brush the bruised, torn-up knuckles. He hasn’t seen him like this in a long time. Since after Mom died. It scares him a little to see his dad looking so lost, but the fear has nowhere to go, because if Rick is lost, that means he needs Carl more than ever, so Carl just stands still and swallows it back.

There’s a long pause, and Rick’s palm kneads at him, heavy and warm and slow, like his skin is fused to Carl’s shirt. Finally he sighs and pulls Carl in to kiss his forehead with a scratch of rough whiskers.

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Okay,” says Carl slowly, even though he knows it isn’t.

Rick can’t say what’s on his mind: _I never know if this is the last time I’ll get to touch you._ They lost three men, good men, on the supply run. It isn’t a fact he can keep from Carl for long, and he knows that; but he doesn’t want to tell him, all the same. Doesn’t want his son’s day to be soiled by the inevitability of death that surrounds them even here, barricaded inside the prison’s fences and concrete walls.

Still, the thought dogs Rick’s mind and won’t let go. It drove him down here the moment he got back, needing to see Carl, needing the reassurance that the two of them are still here. Any of those three dead men could have been Rick. And then Carl would be an orphan, then –

“Come on,” Carl says abruptly, taking Rick’s hand like he used to do when he was small. “They’re probably serving lunch up there. You look like you should eat.”

Maybe Rick can’t say the thing that’s really on his mind, but he gets the feeling that somehow, Carl understands anyway.

It’s more mercy than he’s ever deserved, Rick thinks, folding his fingers around Carl’s. The fact that they’ve made it this far. Neither of them whole, neither of them the same as they were, but it’s more than he could have hoped for when he crawled into that tank two years ago, expecting to die.

He swallows and nods. The words he wants to say stick in his teeth.

“Alright. You lead the way.”

They leave the vegetable patch and tread up the slight slope of the grass in lockstep, Carl pulling Rick along, Rick following, willing himself not to think about any of the hundred things that could destroy this life they’ve made, the ways he could be dead tomorrow, the ways Carl could die. He wants to be here in this moment.

Carl’s skin is soft and flushed splotchy pink from the sun, and he keeps their fingers linked almost all the way up to the prison. _Tomorrow_ , Rick thinks. Tomorrow he’ll tell the council that he’s done leading runs, let Daryl take over. Tomorrow he’ll be a farmer, and only a farmer. Really embrace it, this chance they've been given, for the first time. His hands will reach into the soil and bring up new life, and when Carl touches him he won’t hold the feeling tight like it’s already their last memory, because they will have tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.


End file.
